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My family was Catholic. My mother’s family was huge. I went to Catholic school. My father’s family was wealthy, but you would never know it because my grandfather dressed very humbly and lived a simple lifestyle. I was lucky. My parents could afford for me to get a very good education. I got a bachelor’s degree in religious studies. Then I got a master’s degree in religious studies. This was not a ministerial program. It was the academic study of religion. I was going to be a professor but my mom developed terminal cancer so I didn’t want to move away. I went to law school instead.My father’s side of the family is very educated. Most of my cousins have graduate degrees, focusing on engineering, finance, and the classics. My mother’s side of the family is working class. They are anti-intellectual. Most of my cousins on that side did not go to college. They went to the military. They are extremely conservative and love Trump and Fox News.My father made me get a job as a waiter when I was in high school. The experience forever changed me. The utter poverty of my co-workers was a real eye opener. We had people who lived in a week by week hotel room. Everyone struggled but never figured out why they worked so hard but had nothing. Experiencing a corporate environment was surreal. The paternalistic control of the workers was obvious, but people missed it. Corporations use typical mind control techniques. For example, we would have to call customers “guests.” This was Orwellian doublespeak. Target does it too. The waitresses and cooks accepted the crushing poverty of their lives without question. It was sad. The experience also convinced me that I needed to study hard and avoid that form of wage slavery. The restaurant was a plantation, except the slaves were rented, not owned. It taught me that corporations are private tyrannies. The boss controls your means of survival—without money you are homeless, cut off from medical insurance, and hungry. Because you serve at will you have little power.I loved college. Being exposed to so many different ideas and discussing them with my professors was a giant leap forward for my understanding of things. I began reading in many different areas, including philosophy, politics, theology, history, psychology, sociology, economics and science. Graduate school took these ideas further and helped me learn how to do academic writing and to analyze very abstract philosophical writings. It is very hard work to really study a subject in depth. I also learned that things often aren’t as they always seem. Beginning law school was terrifying. There were so many people who were brilliant there. And in law school the grades are based on a curved grading scale. There were doctors, CEO’s, engineers and even a former child prodigy in my class. Law school taught me to see things from two perspectives. I had to learn how to “argue both sides.”Tragedy has shaped my perspective. In law school my father suffered a dramatic MS flare up that left him further debilitated. My mother died from cancer. She was my best friend and we were very close. I discovered my wife was having an affair while I was in night classes. We got divorced. After my mom died I developed a severe case of inflammatory arthritis that has been treatment resistant to this day. I am in pain all the time and my joints remain swollen and inflamed. I am on 5 different medications, one of them being Enbrel.Working at the restaurant informed my perspective of the horrors of capitalism. It showed me how the poor individualized their poverty, blaming themselves. For many years I was a Democrat. I believed in the ability of the electoral process to make things better. The Obama presidency changed my perspective entirely. He was a Trojan Horse from Wall Street. The final straw, however, was the 2016 Democratic primaries. The rigging of the primaries against Bernie Sanders destroyed my faith in the Democratic Party. But Bernie’s betrayal by endorsing Clinton was enough. It became abundantly clear that the bourgeoisie would never permit real change through voting. If voting were a threat we wouldn’t be allowed to do it. So then I moved along the path of libertarian socialism, reading Noam Chomsky and other socialists that focused on democracy. The Catalonian government in 1936 and the Paris Commune were examples of true democratic socialism. The workers owned the means of production and the leadership was horizontal, not vertical.Then the latest climate change report came out. It made it clear that we need to stop using fossil fuels within 12 years or face cataclysmic consequences. Despite this climate change legislation will never get anywhere. Those with wealth and ownership of the means of production would have to give up their power to have climate change legislation succeed. But these are the same people that have the most influence over politicians. Nancy Pelosi won’t even create a special climate change committee to study the issue. Schumer is no better. Democracy requires at least some type of consensus. Half the population thinks climate change is a hoax. Trump thinks it is a ploy by the Chinese to make American manufacturing non competitive.Sadly, the history of democratic socialist organizations has ended by imperial or fascist attack. The King of France brutally smashed the Paris Commune, killing 20,000 people. Franco crushed the Catalonian government. Lenin recognized what happened in Paris. He demanded the Soviet Union be centralized to consolidate the power of the Soviet Union. The war with the Whites proved this true. The civil war was incredibly bloody.Given these factors I started researching the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was shocked to discover that it collapsed due to mismanagement, not some inherent problems with Marxism Leninism itself. I had been propagandized my entire life so I believed all the Cold War propaganda I was fed as a kid. “Communism killed 100 million people,” “communism doesn’t work because people are too selfish,” “the people were starving,” “it had nothing to do with Marxism,” etc.Mismanagement Killed the Soviet UnionMy ideal government would be communism as described by Marx. The means of production would be owned by the workers and ran by the workers. It would be a moneyless, stateless and classless society. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”When people refer to the Soviet Union as “communism” this is a colloquialism. Lenin never referred to the Soviet Union as communist. He always said it was socialist.Lenin acknowledged that the Soviet Union was “socialism working toward communism.” In the 1960’s Khrushchev restated that the Soviet Union was a socialist nation working toward communism. Cuba recently reinserted this phrase back into its new Constitution. North Korea has given up on Marxism Leninism in 1998. It now follows Juche.My second favorite model would be libertarian socialism. But due to concerns about imperial attacks from outside I don’t believe this system can entirely work until the world is cleansed of capitalism everywhere.Which leaves us with Marxism Leninism. This was a new form of political system. The intention was to have them become more democratic in time while still keeping the party strong to preserve the interests of the proletariat against bourgeois encroachment. After Stalin died the gulags were closed. No more purges. And this could have continued had they not stopped the regular rotation of high ranking officials in the government. Power for too long corrupts. China imposed term limits and other anti-corruption measures. The party leadership in China is very strong. And this is not due to market reforms. China intentionally watched the fall of the USSR and tried to avoid its mistakes.TortureExtrajudicial killingsSlave labor in prisons with chain gangsIndefinite detentionInvading other nationsConcentration camps at the border, separating children from their parentsArming dictatorships that commit mass atrocitiesThe ability of the leader to attack any nation for any reason at any timeFor profit prisons in the nation that composes 5% of the world’s population but harbors 22% of the world prisonersThis is not China. This was not the Soviet Union. This is the power of the President of the United States of America.Let’s Be Honest – Stalin Was Less of a Criminal Than Churchill, Truman, and LBJLeft Anticommunism: The Unkindest CutRecommended Reading List.pdfMy worldview is still developing.